I'm planning on implementing a couple of different minimap rings to fill that wasted corner behind them and give a place to drop all our plugin icons.

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{{Had to remove the pics, I'll put em back up when make one from another skin}}

Thats an easy one, just have an appropriate filler in that corner with spots to drop your icons and make an option for putting the mini map at the lower right as well to satisfy those that have ther map down there.

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{{Had to remove the pics, I'll put em back up when make one from another skin}}

Edit: Just threw this pic together to demonstrate what I'm thinking and immediately ran into an obvious problem. I'm using Gimp as I cannot afford Photoshop and my copy of Paint.net died, and cannot figure out how to stretch the layer. I can re-size the canvas, but anything pasted off the side of the original layer just disappears... Any Ideas? I increased the scal of the original TGA, cleared the minimap ring completely and re-pasted it at the original scale, but I'm not sure how this will affect the allignment in game.

Further, for me at least I always use Tonic Bars and have that Travel bar and General bar on the right side below my minimap. As a temporary measure I plan on putting a second tray extending down from my altered minimap. Only instead of just having a tray to put my bars in, I'm going to put the Milestone skill icon from in-game over where the port bar will be, a good horse icon or goat icon (depending on racial skin) for the stable, maybe the racial sneak icon for racial travel options, an anvil for crafting, fishing pole for hobby, the skirmish banner for skirmish, and not sure what to put in the last (class) spot.

Now thats a temporary measure because the 2 things I'm wondering is, 1 is it possible to make an entirely new UI bar elements similar to the toolbar just smaller that can be moved and scaled just like the rest of the UI. And 2, can you guys think of anything I can do to improve this idea?

As the title says, I'm still working on it. I found the layer size and offset control in Gimp. Obviously it still needs some work. Now I'll have to make the plugin buttons stay on top and I'm having a problem with the Minimap not reaching all the way to the corner. Any Ideas?

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{{Had to remove the pics, I'll put em back up when make one from another skin}}

Buttons used by plugins will not stay on top of other UI elements unless expressly made so, the basic behaviour of UI elements is that whichever goes active (so for instance clicking the mini map) will go on top of other elements (so, plugin buttons ...). The "Z-order" of plugin buttons has to be set in the plugins to avoid that

Edit: And no you can't make new "toolbars" from UI definition files, only plugins can do that.

Thanks for the feedback Equendil. I knew going in that the plugin buttons had to be adjusted in each individual plugin and have put in requests to those plugins authors that weren't already set to do so. I know most people would rather have em drop into the background, but have noticed that even when you're not trying to integrate them like I am if you put them too near an existing UI element they tend to get lost.

About the new bars for use with my Tonicbars (or kragenbars or multi-page bars or whatever one you use)... I was afraid the answer would be something like that. Well what would it take to make a plugin frame that would draw elements from the UI or that could be customizable? With the advent of the in game art grabber we could even (possibly) have a drop down of icons to drop onto the head of each bar or bar extension (pop-out bar).

At this time none of the "Bar plugins allow for "labelling" of your bars. Sure I know what I put in there, but with 20+ bars and extension bars (pop-out) It would be nice to have something to say, THIS is my port bar, this is my Stable, etc.

And also, at present all of the bars either have no fame, or are in windows, as demonstrated by my pic below and by Paged Slots and other "Windowed" bar plugins.

Obviously most people prefer it this way, and most of the time its great, but some, like myself, see their UI as more than just another obstruction. I have many Skins and use them much like the cosmetic system in game, to set up my character, who he is, where he is from, his likes and dislikes.

Sorry about the rant, I was just trying to explain more clearly what I'm looking for.

Generally the best rule is to just allow individual bars (of whatever type) to be moved freely by the user, as opposed to trying to guess. While requiring users to go through an additional step isn't ideal, it's a bit tough to make things automatic when we have no way of accessing the position of the skin elements themselves.

But I wasn't thinking of changing any of the existing plugins, there are too many different skins to try and match. I was thinking of a bar made up of the two ends and a center length, (so the length could be changed). The graphics would be simple, made by anyone who has an interest. Then with an overlay of of 1-12 slot squares. As an added feature or maybe later on down the road introduce an option to put graphics on the squares from a drop down of available icons drawn from those in the game.

I'd like to emphasize that this would be a specialty plugin separate from any quickbar plugins. If you want it, you generate and drop this graphic bar, and then place your quickbars over it. I know there might not be a lot of people who would be interested in this, but there just might be enough to make it worth while.

Bevy O Bars has a skin feature already. Not perfect, but no one showed an interest so I didn't develop it any further.

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"Our ideals may never be realised, But they indicate what we are trying to do." Dick Tahta